Inside Out

Part I: Contained

Oh, it’s the archetypes again. I roll my eyes so they can nap in the cavity of my head. There’s a visitor here. A ghost. I don’t feel like speaking so I give it a balloon to visit the hemisphere of someone else's waking dream. Nothing new, nothing new.. When I pop my eyes back in their bone dry sockets to visit the now, the princess walks to a different village. Without a second thought the sea parts in half. She passes through untouched by the storm. Beautiful on the next horizon, and farther away from me still.

I am not a violent person but this rejection makes me want to hurt her. I awaken to reality from a misty fantasy. Here, the scientist stands over me in inspection. He who is maddened by measurement. He a many faced hell, I the experiment. What will he do? Bind me in density? I’m more clever and etheric than he thinks. I breathe into oceanic mist and survey the options: an unforgiving sea or cyanide potions at his feet. I stumble backwards into a shipwreck.

Better the sea then he. LEAVE LEAVE LEAVE ME BE.

I breathe my boat back into life and she meets the sea, who seems unwilling to receive me. For good measure, I stick my tongue out at the psychotic, measuring formulas and calculating the distance between X and Y, he and I. I eat his equations and he burns my poetry.

He will not chart back into my life. Tonight, I am free.

Part II: Widening

But… there’s someone on my head… Again? I passionately shake my arms around my mind, trying to create protection of any kind. Is a butterfly landing on my thoughts or am I being crowned? Kings jewels or… a wreath of thorns? How am I supposed to find freedom with weapons braiding my speech? Daggers digging metaphors into my skull. Bleeding, like, Jesus Christ. Was I the son yesterday or a few thousand years ago? Well, let’s see, what does the book say?

I throw the text off the side, nothing but coded lies. Dickens can stay. May their corrupted lines decompose into arbitrary matter at the ocean floor. Maybe I’ll read it washed up on shore, when the archaic bullshit alchemizes to the truest storytelling form - sand. My atoms are snowflakes and melting feels like becoming a new form.

Speaking of geometry, when did my mouth become a hornets nest? There’s noise in the silence of my mind. I can’t hear the bees sing when you’re so damn loud. Spirit, why are you chewing on my words again? I asked you to stop last time but this time I won't be so kind. I scream into my burning gums, and spit out sounds like pits of rotten fruit.

Towards freedom, but.. I can’t breathe down here. How did I end up in the ocean? It seems I threw myself overboard, too. The boat capsized yesterday, or a decade ago. I can’t tell but there’s no survivors but pages of metaphor and my rotting flesh.

The stingers are still in my gums, little knives. When did the war begin behind my lips? I chew to make a tunnel, it hurts but I don’t stop and won’t stop until it reaches the other side. The little blades help me. Ocean water floods my speech. A secret path out of my cheek and into the world. Leave, spirits and words.

You can’t all stay inside me.

I fly towards the bottom of the ocean, where stars sing. There’s a city here. Atlantis beckons me home and I plummet deeper still. As my organs rise out of the confines of encasing, a once home body begins breaking. Atoms, melting. Here, a moment of peace. A taste of freedom, so close I can almost rip in half to reach it.

Part III: Severance

And just as the eroding bones of my fingers begin to touch crystalline walls of a great, forgotten city, I am thrusted back into matter. I awake on a hospital bed, home to density. It is 1946, other souls scream around me. They are wounded and locked in a prison, too. I cough up seawater and breathe until my lungs fill with what you call air and I call poison. The princess has returned, she is standing over me, eyes plucked raw with grief.

The scientist is smiling at me, he is binding me with leather straps to chain my freedom. A spirit forced into unforgiving ground. I coil and turn and shake and shiver. I don’t want to make the princess cry but cannot take the poison he’s injecting in me - boiling my blood and rotting my liver. He calls it medicine, I call it violence.

My eyes shutter to a close and return to their sunken home. Hollower still. Here in the cavity of shadows, the ghost returns. It seems the balloon didn’t take them as far as I’d hoped. We hold each other in an understanding of loneliness. In darkness, we speak words of worlds others don’t allow themselves to see.

Tommy’s thoughts

February 11th, 1946

Asheville Mental Hospital.